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Sniffer dogs search for bodies in ruins of Tacloban

Stephen McDonellUpdated
Mon 18 Nov 2013, 2:33 PM AEDT

International military transport aircraft bringing supplies are now landing more frequently in the typhoon-devastated regions of the Philippines. One flight has brought a specialist team of sniffer dogs from the United States to search for bodies in the rubble that was once the city of Tacloban.

Transcript

ELEANOR HALL: Well as we heard, international military transport aircraft are bringing supplies more frequently now into the typhoon-devastated regions.

One flight has brought a specialist team of sniffer dogs from the United States to search for bodies in the rubble that was once the city of Tacloban. Their work so far suggests there may be an alarmingly high death toll from Typhoon Haiyan.

The leader of the search team, Adam Marlatt, spoke to Steven McDonell in Tacloban.

ADAM MARLATT: We've covered essentially from the RTR Hospital to here. Several blocks on the ocean front and...

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Which is a couple of hundred metres, really.

ADAM MARLATT: Yeah, exactly.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: And how many bodies have you found in there?

ADAM MARLATT: Just in one outlet that we pushed into, we found about 50 positive hits with the human recovery dog. Based on that, we know that there's a pretty decent amount more underneath that, because the dog's going to hit what's on the surface first. And so until we remove those, we won't know what further is underneath it.

There's about five metres of rubble - so we're still waiting to see when we can get in there with heavy teams, and based on that we can get a more accurate assessment.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: And so if you were to have a guess in that area then, how many bodies might there be there?

ADAM MARLATT: In that football field-sized area alone, there could probably be about three times that amount - so probably about 150 human remains that just haven't been detected yet. And that's not even including what's continuing to wash up on the shore now, 'cause every day or so there's more bodies that are pushing in on the exact same location.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Now that's just a couple of hundred metres in a huge city. The number of bodies out there could be just unthinkably high.

ADAM MARLATT: It depends area by area, but everywhere that we've been going to, we've been getting positive hits by the human remains dog. So we literally got out of a truck, we walked five feet into a debris pile, and there was a body in there.

So there's a lot of work that's still to be done here and it's probably going to take several weeks, given the resources that are currently on the ground.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: And so when you find bodies, what happens then? Do you tell the Filipino authorities and then they clear the bodies out? Is that the idea? Like the military or someone like that?

ADAM MARLATT: Yes, we're flagging bodies directly with tape. If they're in debris, we're flagging above the debris with fluorescent tape. And then at that point they're coming in behind us when possible to pick it up. But with that one search alone we're way above what their capacity is at this point.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: And so, for people who haven't been here and seen this situation, why is it taking so long to pull bodies out of the rubble?

ADAM MARLATT: So, because there's not traditional heavy search and rescue teams here, because the probability of finding a live human is pretty low, given the storm surge amount, that a lot of these teams were turned away, just because they didn't have the logistics and assets to keep them on the ground.

So because they were turned away or never arrived here, a lot of that heavy equipment can't be used to do human remains collections. So the government here, because we're on an island, is working with the resources that they have. But even logistics like fuel and body bags and other things over the past week have been an issue.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Not enough.

ADAM MARLATT: Yeah. It's not enough at this point to handle the load that we have. So it's going to have to continue to come in and start to grow exponentially if we're going to take care of this before it turns into a much bigger crisis.